American Speech, Vol. 91, No. 2, May 2016 doi 10.1215/00031283-3633085 Copyright 2016 by the American Dialect Society 109 NEWSPAPER DIALECTOLOGY: HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE MASS MEDIA TO STUDY CANADIAN ENGLISH CHARLES BOBERG McGill University abstract: This article asks whether collaboration with a popular newspaper can be an effective means of collecting data on dialect variation and whether the resulting data are comparable with those gathered by more traditional dialectological methods. These questions are examined with a pair of dialect surveys carried out in 2014 by Metro News, in collaboration with the author, in cities across English-speaking Canada. The resulting data, comprising thousands of responses, reveal remarkable convergence with previous research, particularly with the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey reported previously in this journal. They display both an alternation between British and American lexical choices and regional variation in North American lexical choices across Canada. The new data both confirm and add to earlier accounts of variation in Canadian English, among other things making possible a new analysis of diachronic patterns in real time. Popular media can therefore be valuable research partners for academic dialectologists. keywords: Canadian English, dialectology, lexical variation, lexical change, spelling, dialect surveys J ust over a decade ago, the results of the North American Regional Vocabulary Survey (NARVS) were reported in this journal (Boberg 2005). NARVS was a written questionnaire distributed to thousands of participants all across the United States and Canada, designed to identify national and regional differences in the vocabulary of everyday, contemporary urban life. That report introduced methodological innovations in its quantitative analysis that were aimed at identifying the most regionally diagnostic variables, of the 53 included in the survey, as well as the most important regional divisions, both along the U.S.-Canada border and within Canada. The analysis revealed, among other things, that the most consistent lexical difference between the United States and Canada involves the terms for school years—American first grade versus Canadian grade one (46); that contrary to popular belief, no region of Canada is consistently more American than another (52); that the American Speech Published by Duke University Press